Solving America's Problems

The top 400 richest families in America pay about 2% in taxes while everyone else pays 20 to 26%. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley kick off a new series on housing, laying out why the American dream of homeownership is structurally rigged — flat wages, boomers holding 70% of property, and a tax code built as welfare for the top 20%. They trace housing booms back to the 1920s and post-WWII Levittowns, then debate rent...

Real estate investor Grant Cardone says never buy a home — rent instead, and put your money in the market. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley debate the case for renting versus owning. Dave, who's rented for over a decade, lays out the freedom of renting against the nonstop chores of ownership. They find zero libertarian voices anywhere in their research — everyone agrees housing is broken. Internationally, Vienn...

The top 400 richest families in America pay about 2% in taxes — while everyone else pays 20 to 26%. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley dig into what surprised them most in their research. Dave says the tax code was quite literally built for people not to pay taxes, funneling mortgage and college-savings deductions mostly to the top 20%. He found 30 million American children living in poverty — more than any count...

Baby boomers now own roughly 70% of American homes and property — and politicians are too scared to touch it. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley lay out the thesis for a new series on housing: wages stayed flat while prices and interest rates exploded. Dave says the newest housing law just passed the Senate 85-5 and became law without a presidential signature. It bars investors who own 350+ single-family homes from buy...

The best U.S. cash experiments still can't prove money durably improves health or child outcomes. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley spend five episodes chasing why, hearing from Ron Lynch that free cash is a chain, not a check, and from Chris Rimbal that money itself may vanish within 20 years. Dr. Conley and Dr. Rhodes weigh in last: cash helps, but isn't the answer either host hoped for. Jerremy pitches a Citizen Capital ...

Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley close the series on the loudest disagreement yet: has the AI revolution already hit, or is it still coming? Dave says he now runs this entire podcast alone — work that used to require four or five staffers — because of AI. Jerremy pushes back, insisting today's AI still isn't truly intelligent, just a sharper search engine stitching articles together. Dave counters that the Unit...

The best U.S. cash experiments still can't prove giving people money durably improves health or child outcomes. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley pick up their UBI rebrand mid-series: Dave proposes literal shares in America, dividends tied to the AI and data economy already built on public information. Jerremy renames the whole concept the Citizen Capital program, hoping shared ownership sells better than a handout ever cou...

Free cash isn't a check — it's a chain, according to Ron Lynch, who argues handouts push society toward technocratic feudalism. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley open this series admitting the American dream started fracturing sometime in the 1990s, once information itself became the real currency. Lynch's claim: money given for nothing quietly erodes purpose, feeding the "trust fund baby" stigma. Dave pushes back, sp...

Recipients were two percentage points less likely to work — and critics called that proof people quit when you pay them. Dr. Elizabeth Rhodes ran the longest unconditional cash study in U.S. history: 1,000 people, $1,000 a month, three years. Below the poverty line, nobody worked less. People spent the money on rent, food, and kids, but the financial boost faded to nearly nothing by year three. Rhodes says cash can't fix brok...

Rhodes admits her study was never designed for a world where income decouples from labor — but it's the closest data anyone has for what's coming. People are stitching together patchworks of gig work that standard labor surveys can't even capture. Dave Conley went from \"UBI is a terrible idea\" to \"how are we not doing this\" after weeks of research. Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave land on Social Security for all ages as...

People spent the money on housing, food, and their kids — every global cash study shows this, yet the stereotype persists. The financial wellbeing boost was strong in year one, weaker by year two, and nearly gone by year three. Nobody started a business, but entrepreneurial interest surged because the labor market doesn't work for people who need flexibility. Rhodes says cash hits a wall when healthcare costs $5,000 and there...

Recipients were two percentage points less likely to work — and critics called that the whole story. Dr. Elizabeth Rhodes ran the longest three-year unconditional cash experiment in U.S. history, gave 1,000 people $1,000 a month, and found something economists missed: below the poverty line, nobody worked less. Sam Altman helped fund it, but Rhodes had NIH and NSF backing with full scientific independence. Jerremy Alexander N...

The biggest US cash experiment returned a big fat zero on measurable child outcomes. Dalton Conley tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave that poverty rewires the body at the DNA level, but cash alone can't undo it. The 1960s negative income tax kept people unemployed longer and increased divorce. AI leaders dropped the jobs apocalypse once it scared people. Alaska's Permanent Fund is the closest thing America has to UBI — ...

Dalton Conley tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave: yes, he'd take the UBI check — because you don't have a choice. A thousand dollars a month transforms life in rural Mississippi and barely registers in New York City. Jerremy says he'd opt out; Conley says almost nobody thinks that way. Social Security is untouchable because it's near-universal and tied to work — UBI needs that same armor. Conley's lab found that a...

Nobody trusts the institutions that would run the check. Dalton Conley tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave a sovereign wealth fund modeled on Alaska's Permanent Fund — structured like the Federal Reserve — might be the only design that survives politics. When Alaskans get bigger checks, they go to the dentist more, and missing teeth is one of the most stigmatizing outcomes in American life. Two siblings raised in t...

The largest US cash experiment returned a big fat zero on measurable child outcomes. Dalton Conley tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave the American dream only worked because WWII obliterated every competitor. The 1960s negative income tax kept people unemployed longer and increased divorce. AI leaders dropped the jobs apocalypse narrative once it scared people. A MAGA-Bernie coalition might be the only path left — but 11...

Forty percent of Americans are one paycheck from crisis — and Chris Remboldt says that's shareholder capitalism deliberately optimizing stock price over human welfare. Post-money means real wealth is time, energy, and atoms. He tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that UBI is a dead end, ad-supported free housing and food arrive in 10-15 years, and a self-replicating Von Neumann fleet lands in four years. Dave push...

Chris Remboldt says superintelligence is already here and a self-replicating Von Neumann robot fleet arrives in four years. He predicts AI companies will quietly replace broken institutions because regulated industries can never reform themselves from inside. Dave pushes back hard: Big AI strip-mined decades of collective intellectual capital for free, and the robots should hit Liberia before the Tesla factory. Jerremy Alexander Ne...

Most people aren't starting at zero — they're at negative 100, and Chris Remboldt says the first move is giving up the belief that help is coming. He tells Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley that UBI "makes him think of the DMV" and that in 10-15 years food and housing are free — ad-supported. Labor is a terrible foundation for human dignity. The best mind-virus architect wins every election.

Timestamps:

• (00:00...